Brace yourself if you’ve heard this one before, but … the NFL regular season draws viewers away from WWE Raw. I know, I know, it seems unlikely. Strangely, there’s some weird correlation between WWE totally mailing in Raw for 17 straight weeks every year and the NFL running Monday Night Football opposite Raw. Small sample size, but there may be fire near that smoke.
Anyway, this past fall was particularly harsh on the Raw ratings, as WWE not only had a truly abysmal NFL season to compete with, but also a truly abysmal Presidential election cycle. In fact, one of the weeks where Raw went up against both NFL and a debate netted the all-time worst rating for Raw. Ever. That was just a few months ago. The return of Bill Goldberg gave Raw a significant bump in October, but then it was back to the doldrums.
So the good news for everyone is that it’s the Road to WrestleMania, and the NFL won’t be running on Mondays until the fall again. Showbuzz Daily reports that Monday’s rating for Raw was 1.14, not too far off from that big 1.19 that Goldberg brought in in October. 3.271 million viewers tuned in, which is the most for a three-hour Raw since August 29, which pulled in 3.413 million viewers to see who would capture the vacant Universal Championship the week after SummerSlam.
Viewers dropped each of the three hours, but not by much, and with the overall numbers being the best they’ve been in months, WWE can feel very positive about how their sports competition-free Mondays are going to go the rest of the way to WrestleMania 33.
